Well, you can’t fall out of love in a blink. I refuse to put Riley in this woman’s crosshairs.
But I guess there’s no harm in mentioning that I got it from her. “My ex,” I say begrudgingly.
Julia traces her index finger through the fog building on the window. “Forgive me for being a century out of touch, but what do you mean byex?”
Heat floods my cheeks. “Former…lover.” The word feels strange on my tongue, too intimate for a conversation with this woman I just met.
Her hands go perfectly still.
Wait, why am I staring at her hands?
I drop my gaze.
Finally, she says, “I see. And why is she yourexlover and not your current one?”
The knife in my heart twists deeper, reopening the wound I’ve been trying to cauterize. The silence stretches, and something about the darknessoutside, or maybe just the turbulent day catching up with me, makes me too exhausted to keep my walls up. “She was just done with me, I guess.”
“She gave you the journal and disappeared?” Julia asks, her tone sharpening. “Tell me more about this girl.”
“She gave it to me a long time ago,” I say quickly. “She knows I love old books, so she probably thought…” I lift a shoulder. Who the hell knows what Riley thought? Apparently, I didn’t know her as well as I thought I did.
“And when she broke your heart, you burned it?” Julia asks.
“Yeah.” My eyes sting as I hear those words spoken aloud. “The way she broke up with me was so juvenile that I wonder if she never realized how deeply I fell for her. Like she thought we were kids holding hands at the movies instead of women in a real relationship.”
There’s a pause. Okay, so I’m discussing my love life with someone who had her hands on me earlier. Someone who, through magic I don’t understand, makes me feel more at-ease than I did with Riley in the last few days. But these feelings are from the spell, right? It’s not real. Not like what I had with Riley.
“Where did you meet?” Julia asks.
My cheeks heat up as I force my brain back to the conversation. Her tone is clinical and emotionless—she’s trying to solve a mystery while I’m vomiting my deepest feelings like this is therapy.
“A park,” I reply. “The summer after high school, I was on the grass, reading, and Riley was doing the same a few feet over. We started talking.”
“Hm.”
I can practically see the gears turning in Julia’s head, cataloging every detail about Riley. Maybe I shouldn’t have brought her up.
“Why does any of this matter?” I ask.
“Because people don’t just stumble across cursed objects by accident. And it so happens that witches mature into their craft around the time they reach womanhood.”
My blood runs cold. If Riley really is a witch, this would explain a hell of a lot. But it also makes the breakup hurt in an entirely new way. If she was struggling with discovering something about herself, why didn’t she tell me? I would have supported her and loved her through it.
“My turn to ask another question,” I say before this conversation gets any closer to Julia suggesting that we hunt down Riley. “Why does the spell become permanent when the moon sets?”
She sighs. I prepare to deflect again, to insist that Riley is just a normal girl with a sappy side, but then Julia says, “Because spells are tied to natural cycles. The moon, the seasons, the body, flora and fauna. Magic takes time to plan, to cast, and to root.”
“How poetic.”
She waves a dismissive hand. “Merely facts.”
“So this binding spell is linked to the moon?”
“Rebecca is particularly skilled with time-based spells and curses.”
“You said she’s a celestial witch, right? Like how you’re a sanguine witch?”
She dips her chin. “We’re named for how we draw our power.”
